Earlier this year Chancey released his first EP, Leaflet No. 1, as War Jacket. Chancey and friends are now finishing work on the band’s first full-length album, Live Like You’re Going Home. Pre-order physical copies of the album through War Jacket’s Kickstarter campaign, which ends this Friday, and catch War Jacket at Bottletree on Thursday. Though War Jacket is a collaboration of musicians, when performing live Chancey is joined by Lori Cheng and Joel Madison Blount. The group has several southeastern dates planned into the fall. The Clay States and Lauren-Michael Sellers will open the show, which begins at 9 p.m., and tickets are $7.

Carla Jean Whitley for Birmingham Box Set: How did War Jacket come to be?

Caleb Chancey: The group kind of came together because of GreyHaven,
and because I wanted to start putting together all these songs I’d been
writing for GreyHaven and some on the instrument a little bit. I
actually found an instrument I fell in love with, the baritone ukulele,
and until GreyHaven I didn’t play anything.

BBS: Why did you extend this project beyond the bounds of GreyHaven?

CC: I
wanted to see if there was a centralized theme that was there, and then
I also wanted to see if I could actually create something as a whole
thought, a whole LP. It fell naturally. Corey [Scogin,
who runs sound and records audio at GreyHaven], who is recording
everything and being the sound engineer, having his studio readily
available, we just started to pop in every now and then to put down
tracks. Then it started becoming an album. … I wanted to test myself and
see it if could actually happen.

BBS: What’s the story with the name War Jacket?

CC: The
guy who’s doing all the design for the album, David Blumberg, we were
talking about the concept of the album. We had the idea of making the
album before we had the idea of an actual band name. It was just going
to be under my name. After I talked to a couple people, including
[Birmingham-based singer-songwriter] Jon Black,
he encouraged me to think of a band name. The group is technically just
me, but I have people come in and play with me. A lot of times it’s a
broader umbrella if you have a band name that’s above everyone. It can
shift as much as it needs to under that name and doesn’t have to be
explained in a lot of ways.

The actual name War Jacket came from
one of the songs that wasn’t going to be on the album. I hated the
melody, it worked a while back … [but I] rewrote the melody. That’s the
last song that’s going to be recorded. It mentions the two words war and
jacket, and I thought that fit together really well.

That was a lot of rabbit trails!

BBS: As life tends to be, right? So, why’d you decide to release an LP so soon on the heels of the EP?

CC: The
EP was a unique EP in that two of the songs that were on it are going
to be on the record, but they were in a middle state. It wasn’t a demo.
It would’ve been fine if we left them how they are, but I knew they
weren’t completed. So I kind of wanted to give people an example of
seeing something right in the middle of the process. I love process, I
love the creative process, so it was a way of letting people in on that.
People who have listened to these songs on the EP, when they listen to
it on the album they’ll notice they’re more developed.

The EP
gives people a taste of what I do. I wanted the LP to follow pretty soon
so it would be pretty fresh in people’s minds, the difference between
the LP and the EP. We were working on the LP before the EP, and the EP
kind of came out of that. We were like, we should go ahead and release
this.

BBS: What are the differences between the two?

CC: The
EP had two instrumentals on it that fit somewhat in the LP. There’s one
instrumental in the LP that’s solo cello, and I really love it. But
musically, they’re really similar. The introduction of what I wanted to
do in process, even the artwork and the music, I chose some songs that
were a little bit more ambient driven. The artwork was more ambient, it
was like there weren’t any forms in it. It was very metaphoric. A lot of
the photography we chose for it, you couldn’t really pick out objects
in it.

On the LP, the photography is in color. It definitely has
some distinction to it and some purpose to it. [The music has a stronger
theme, as well,] moving from fear and sorrow to life at the end of it.
The EP musically was a little bit more vague because it was just giving
you pictures of what was going to happen, then you get focused in on it
during the LP.

BBS: Why did you decide to use Kickstarter to raise money for this album?

CC: The
Kickstarter is for not the ultimate raising money for the album to be
made, but for the physical product. The reason I wanted to do that is
because I can’t afford to press this how I know it would need to be. I
worked really hard with the art direction of the album as well with our
designer, and I really want people to experience the full idea behind
it, which I think you get with the tangible object more than the mp3s.
The music will convey an idea that the art will back up, and the art
will convey an idea that the music will back up.

I’m not at a point where I can financially afford the art that we
want to so I’ve turned to people to preorder it, essentially
collaborating on the final step of the process.

It fit too,
because the whole album is very community driven. I wouldn’t by any
means call myself a musician until this started happening a few months
ago, as I was carried along by the friends and other musicians who
contributed to it. It turned very naturally to a Kickstarter because I
wanted people to hold the album up higher than I could ever reach.

BBS: It
seems like you’ve been playing music more and more lately, and you’re
moving beyond the bounds of GreyHaven into full shows. What are your
hopes, musically?

CC: I don’t know. I’m kind of
taking it a step at a time. This album, I wanted to get it out. I wanted
to get it out of my system, I wanted to give it life with these people
and these friends. From there, I want to start playing around and I want
to start touring more, southern tours. I’m very prone to love other
people’s music. My dream is for the album to do really well and then I
could open for someone really awesome.